Re: Communicating with a servlet using NIO?
On 2007-12-02 13:57:09 -0800, "Qu0ll" <Qu0llSixFour@gmail.com> said:
"Lew" <lew@lewscanon.com> wrote in message
news:w86dne2nkKwgus7anZ2dnUVZ_jKdnZ2d@comcast.com...
Qu0ll wrote:
OK, but how do you do it exactly? What I'm trying to achieve is to do
it from an applet and not have the user have to select a port. The
examples of applet-2-servlet communication I can find use URLConnection
but this only has methods to get OutputStream etc. - nothing in
relation to getting SocketChannel or NIO-speak. Hence my original
question as to whether it can be done with NIO.
I suppose you could use the Socket class instead of URLConnection, but
the value of a channel on the client side is questionable. The point
of NIO is to multiplex several communications going through the same
port. This will not be an issue for a client. Why not just use the
regular IO operations through the URLConnection and just let the server
do the NIO for its own sake?
Are you saying that I could have standard IO at the client end and NIO
at the server end? I didn't realise you could mix them that way. Do
you have an example of how that would work or could you explain it in a
bit more detail?
What do you expect NIO will gain for you on the client side?
Nothing really - I just thought that the client had to be NIO if the
server was NIO.
Not at all. NIO is merely another way to talk to the IO subsystem of
the local host OS. Between hosts, it's all TCP/IP.
Once a sequence of bytes has been handed off to the OS to transmit over
a socket, there is nothing in that sequence of bytes identifying how it
was handed over; the stream {0x00, 0x01, 0x02, 0x03, ....} will look
identical to the receiver regardless of whether you use NIO to write it
or a Socket. What NIO does get you is the ability to multiplex IO
operations on a single thread. For applications with non-trivial
numbers of IO handles open at a time this matters; for programs that
only have one or two sockets, using a thread per socket is fine and
probably easier to read (if, possibly, harder to make thread-correct).
A client connecting to an NIO-based server would look identical to a
client connecting to any other server: new Socket ("192.168.0.1", 2700);
An NIO-based server accepting connections from a non-NIO client would
look identical to a server accepting connections from an NIO client:
someServerSocketChannel.accept ();
-o